“Anyway after that I started just sliding through worlds. Worlds worlds worlds. I stopped caring. It was like when you’ve surfed too much porn on the Web and none of it seems real but you keep going anyway. I’d get to a world and immediately start looking for any excuse to quit and go on to the next one. As soon as I’d see one wrong thing—oh, this one has flies, or the sky is a weird color, or no beer, anything that wasn’t perfect—I’d bail.

“Then one of those times I came back and the whole Neitherlands was busted.”

“What? How do you mean, busted?”

“Broken. Fucked up. Do you know about this? If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

He drained his wineglass. A man came to refill it, and Josh waved him off. “Whiskey,” he said.

He went on.

“At first I thought it was me, I must have broken it. I used it too much, something like that. When my head broke the water that last time it was like the cold punched me in the face. The air was freezing, and the wind was just whipping this dry powdery snow through the squares.”

“How is that even possible?” Quentin said. “I didn’t think the Neitherlands even had weather.”

It made him think of that silent storm, the one that had thrashed the clock-tree back in Fillory. Maybe it was the same wind?

“Something’s deeply messed up there, Quentin. Something’s wrong, something basic. Like systemic. Half the buildings were in ruins. It looked like the place had been bombed. All those beautiful stone buildings just laid open to the sky. Do you remember how Penny said once that they were all full of books? I think he was right, because the air was full of pages, blowing along through the city.”

Josh shook his head.

“I guess I should have grabbed a few, to see what was on them. You would have. I never even thought of it till after.

“You know what I was thinking about? Not dying. I was pretty far from the Earth fountain at that point, a mile maybe. I’d brought warm clothes, but I ditched them when I met the harpy. It was hot as hell there. And she kinda tore at my clothes a lot of the time anyway.